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Updated: May 29, 2025
Soft, but with no unmanly softness; luxuriant, but with no unmannered luxury. To him you owe as to their first sire in art, the grace of Ghiberti, the tenderness of Raphael, the awe of Michael Angelo. Second-rate qualities in all the three, but precious in their kind, and learned, as you shall see, essentially from this man. Second- rate he also, but with most notable gifts of this inferior kind.
They had not forgotten or passed by the sculptured treasures of the city, but had learned something of Donatello, her first great sculptor; of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who wrought those exquisite gates of bronze for Dante's "Il mio bel San Giovanni" that Michael Angelo declared to be fit for the gates of Paradise; and of Brunelleschi, the architect of her great Duomo.
Of the impunity with which a sculptor in that period could submit his genius to the service and the study of ancient art without sacrificing individuality, Donatello furnishes a still more illustrious example than Ghiberti. Early in his youth Donatello journeyed with Brunelleschi to Rome, in order to acquaint himself with the monuments then extant.
'Only he who has learned everything, says Ghiberti,'is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune. In the same strain an exiled humanist writes: 'Wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home.
However this may be, Ghiberti began the work at once, and finished the door on the north side of the Baptistery in ten years.
The panel in which the Baptist is seen up to his waist in the water is surely the very last word in audacity in bronze. Ghiberti was charged with making bronze do things that it was ill fitted for; but I do not know that even he moulded water and transparent water from it.
The subject is the Sacrifice of Isaac, and Ghiberti, with the real instinct of the sculptor, has altogether outstripped Brunellesco, not only in the harmony of his composition, but in the simplicity of his intention. Brunellesco seems to have understood this, and, perhaps liking the lad who was but twenty-two years old, withdrew from the contest.
Luca della Robbia, whose life embraced the first eighty years of the fifteenth century, offers in many important respects a contrast to his contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their immediate followers. He made his art as true to life as it is possible to be, without the rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces of Ghiberti.
Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Orcagna, Verocchio, Ghiberti, Pollajuolo, Ghirlandajo, Luca della Robbia, all underwent this training before they applied themselves to architecture, painting, and sculpture. As the goldsmith's craft was understood in Florence, it exacted the most exquisite nicety in performance as well as design.
It is extremely difficult to determine in what degree the feelings or intelligence of this class influenced the architectural design of the thirteenth century; how far afield the cathedral tower was intended to give delight, and to what simplicity of rustic conception Quercia or Ghiberti appealed by the fascination of their Scripture history.
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